Mitchell Gets Personal

The Mitchells are really the Kilroys, probably from Cork, or that may just be where the boat left from. Despite his best efforts Mitchell has been unable to trace his family, finally admitting that they were likely lost in the mists of time, like so many dirt-poor Famine era emigrants.

Soon after they emigrated George's father, then a young child, was put in an orphanage. It is not clear what happened to his parents.

In the fashion of the day, as Mitchell recounted, the orphaned kids were brought to the local church in Maine and lined up at the altar rail where parishioners could literally walk them home and adopt them there and then. This is how George Mitchell's father came to bear that last name as an elderly couple gave him a home.

In turn his father married Mary Saad, who was born in Lebanon. Times were hard. His father was a janitor at a local college. Yet the son grew up to be a judge, a senator and a peacemaker, and a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000.

Mitchell spent five years in Belfast seeking to negotiate the peace accords. By any measure it was an astounding feat, one he is reluctant to take credit for.

Ruefully he tells the story of so many locals who came up to thank him for trying, but usually they added quietly that they did not think he had a chance of succeeding.

I was of that mindset myself to an extent. Before Mitchell went to Ireland as President Clinton's emissary I met him at his midtown New York law office. At the time the peace was very fragile and the notion of a Good Friday or St. Andrew's Agreement was merely a pipedream. I remember feeling sorry for this man, undertaking what looked like a Herculean task.

Impossible or not he was up for it. He drove the process forward until the final weekend of Good Friday in 1998, and then delivered a spectacular agreement that has entered the history books as an example of conflict resolution.

Mitchell finished his talk to the American Ireland Fund on an upbeat note. For years he has stated it was his ambition to take his young son to Ireland to sit in the visitor's chamber of the Northern Ireland Assembly and watch democracy take place.

Until the recent power-sharing government he felt he could never take his son on that trip, believing that the peace was not yet secured. On Friday he told the guests he was ready to go with his son.

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Nster.com